Introduction

This chapter focuses on the artwork of children, particularly on pictures
they draw of home. By focusing on the way children draw the built
environment, we can begin to understand the urgent need for a spiritual
revolution to restructure the physical environment and revolutionize
education. There is a major shift in consciousness occurring presently
on this planet, and is essential that educators take a leadership
role in this worldwide evolutionary movement. A new archetype in architecture
is emerging one which will deepen our sense of home and change our
lifestyle.

The American Dream

The founding father of the American Dream, Thomas Jefferson, had a
vision of land development which corresponded with that of the first
European colonists of the New World. The cultural changes initiated
by the European colonists cannot be fully understood without looking
at the ecological changes resulting from their practices--especially
the effects of their domination of the land. Clearly, "capitalism
and environmental degradation went hand in hand" (Cronton 161).

The Native Americans had a radically different approach to the ecosystem
from that of the European settlers. They loved the land and respected
it. The New England Indians had developed a system of equilibrium
between the environment and the human community. Their lifestyle was
not centered around a permanent settlement like that of the homesteaders;
instead, they most nomadic, traveling to different locations depending
on seasonal needs. As William Cronton points out in Changes in
the Land, villages in the eastern U.S., were not "fixed
geographical entities: their size and location changed on a seasonal
basis, communities breaking up and reassembling as social and ecological
needs required" (38). Their houses, made of wooden frames covered
with grass mats, could be broken down and reconstructed in a new location
within a few hours. Relocation reduced their impact on the land, enabling
them to work less and enjoy natural diversity more. When they used
other species, they "made sure that no single species became
overused" (53). The American Indian's seasonal mobility also
made surplus property undesirable; they were confident that each environment
would provide them with what they needed. However, as Cronton notes,
their willingness to give property away was not a sign that the property
concept did not exist; rather, by giving, Native Americans received
social prestige and social position within their culture.

Cronton states that the real struggle between the Indians and the
settlers was between the mobile, seasonal and communal use of the
land on the one hand, and the fixed impact of permanent settlements
and private ownership of the land on the other. These different approaches
expressed the different ways in which two people conceived "property,
wealth, and boundaries on the landscape" (53). Colonists such
as John Winthrop characterized the two ways value systems as natural
verses civil.

Winthrop believed the superior system was that of the colonists; their
presumed civil right to land ownership represented an evolution beyond “the natural way,” where "man" sowed and fed
wherever he pleased. Winthrop's philosophy was an extension of the
biblical precept that an individual should possess as much land as
he could "subdue and make productive" (73). In the anonymously
authored "Essay on the Ordering of Towns," it was declared
that the individual should be given the amount of land which was his
due proportion, based on how many servants and cattle he possessed
with which to "improve" the land. These colonial theorists
trivialized the Indian economy and ecology, thus paving the way to
the destruction of their culture. Cronon writes, "In this way,
the social hierarchy of the English class system was reproduced, albeit
in a modified form, in the New World" (73).

The values behind the single family detached house are derived from
the patriarchal/matriarchal tradition responsible for our attempted
domination of nature and other people. Jeffersonian democracy had
a vision of creating an agrarian society by dividing small parcels
of land across the United States. Jefferson's plan, a reaction to
feudalism, was intended to create democratic land ownership as a base
for a political system of a "property?owning democracy," in which political and economic freedom were contingent on land ownership.

Jefferson’s vision of the good society differed from that of
his adversary, Alexander Hamilton: Jefferson wanted to decentralize
power through small family farms, while Hamilton wanted to develop
the new Republic into a great industrial nation. In order for Hamilton's
vision to be realized, there needed to be a centralized government
with economic control. Hamilton did not believe that democracy would
be created by an equality of wealth, whereas Jefferson thought economic
equality (among propertied white males) was essential to maintaining
a democracy. In order to avoid autocracy and coercion, Jefferson believed,
economic independence gained by property ownership was just as important
as political independence gained through the ballot box. Possession
of farmland was the only available means for the citizen to gain economic
independence, allowing families to become self-sufficient. Jefferson
taught that farming and property-owning were democratic, fair goals,
while industrialism and city life were undemocratic and corrupt. Certainly,
European industrial cities of the time such as London, were unpleasant,
even unhealthy places to live.

Womens' rights were not even considered important in this vision of
land development. Jefferson believed that the good woman's life was
centered around home and children. The house was also believed to
be a symbol of the female womb. One can see how easily this vision
connected to the old saying "a woman's place is in the home."

Jefferson's vision was flawed by the very nature of land itself. Some
pieces of land are far more fertile than others; consequently, some
pieces were more valuable for agriculture than others. He also did
not take into account that some people have no desire to become farmers.
And no matter what Jefferson’s vision for the United States,
the forces of industrialism would assure that industry would become
the wave of the future. Even though Jefferson made sure that land
per se could not be monopolized, businesses such as transportation,
storage, and marketing were soon able to establish monopolies (Green
1977).

Jefferson's vision was, of course, insensitive to the philosophy of
the Native Americans. The Indians had an economy based on hunting
and gathering, which required vast wilderness areas in order to be
sustainable. They could not understand the cutting down of forests
in order to build houses. In 1663, the Indians were offered individual
land allotments by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As long as they conformed
to the establish order, they would be given the same terms of ownership
as the settlers. But since that meant giving up hunting and gathering
they could not accept the offer. The Indians preferred tribal ownership
and corporate land?use over individual and nuclear family forms of
land development.

In order to better understand the thought system which allowed the "American Dream" to become established and to spread throughout
the world, lets look into the psychology of children's drawings.

Universal Patterns

Rhoda Kellogg in The Psychology of Children's Art states
that children all over the world draw houses that look alike. She
writes, "Each makes a square to form the walls, a smaller square
to show a window, and elongated square for the chimney, a curly scribble
to indicate smoke. Indeed, the houses are so much alike that the national
origin of the young artists might well be the same" (11). In
his essay, "Cross-Cultural Research in Arts Education,"
Elliot W. Eiser considers the first five years of life--when nationality
in children's drawings cannot be distinguished--to be the "universal
years," in which specific culture has little or no influence
(Eiser 1984).

Even though there seems to be a universality to children's early drawings,
interaction with the environment does impact these early years. This
universality indicates that today we have a single cultural structure
and myth of the home throughout the world. Only after further development
do children pick up the specific cultural symbols and the particular
drawing formulae of their respective societies. A young child does
not draw a particular dog or house, but the archetype of a dog or
house--the ideal type. Consequently, we have a fundamental global
culture, created through our basic interaction with the environment,
which can be witnessed in the early drawings of children. Kellogg
acknowledges that children "are building upon the creative impulse
which is the heritage of all mankind [sic] and is limited to no one
land and culture" (Kellogg 1967, 77).

Carl Jung attributes such universality to a common human heritage
of archetypes, the range of which comprises the collective unconscious.
These archetypes make up the essential psychic energy of brain patterns
common to the human species. Herbert Read notes that "as consciousness
develops, these archetypes sink below the level of consciousness,
where they exercise an unconscious control of our modes of imagination
and thought" (Read 1966, 247). Into these patterns our emotions
and fantasies automatically fit. A series of archetypal forms create
myths, what Jean Houston in The Hero and Her Goddess calls "the DNA of the human psyche" (7). Houston further explains,
"these primal patterns unfold in our daily lives as culture,
mythology, religion, art, architecture, drama, ritual, epic, social
customs, and even mental disorders" (7).

Herbert Read emphasizes
that archetypes are not phantasms of the imagination, but are the
built-in structures that give direction to our mental activities and
amorphous feelings.
Jung observed that when archetypes are at their best the mysteries
of life unfold to us, bringing together mind and body, individual
and community, and self and the universe. When archetypes are repressed
from conscious awareness, alienation occurs, cutting off our ties
with nature, the community, and the Infinite. When an alienated culture
begins to use this unconscious and destructive archetypal energy,
as in the case of Nazi Germany, the energy can become brutal.

However, as this book will point out, the archetype we use for shelter--
the home--is also brutal. As Jean Houston explains, "For the
real question behind the prevailing fear is not about economics, politics,
or even militarism--it's about archetypes" (13). Therefore, we
should not blame the architects for the destruction of the land while
ignoring the underlying cultural assumptions which have forced the
architects to build such a dysfunctional environment. Suzi Gablik
declared that the metaphor of our epoch is the bulldozer. The ultimate
end of the bulldozer is the nuclear family house.

The
Bulldozerby Robert Frances

Bulls
by day
And dozes by night.

Would
that the bulldozer
Dozed all the time.

Would
that the bulldozer
Would rust in peace.

His
watchword
Let not a witch live

His
battle cry
Better dead than red.

Give
me the bullfinch
Give me the bulbul

Give
me if you must
The bull himself

But
not the bulldozer
No, not the bulldozer.

The
Image of Home

Children in the West
tend to draw similar,
box-like houses with
windows and a door.
Do modern children's
drawings of home indicate
that there is a
world-wide conformity
regarding types of land
development--the single-family
detached house--which
is impressed upon the
child early in life
and which directs her
or his values about
land development? James
L. Peacock states in Consciousness and
Change,

Adults learn systems
of symbols beginning
in childhood, but they
postpone learning their
adult roles until adulthood.
Only as adults do they
become fathers, mothers,
voting citizens, and
full-fledged workers,
though they may have
played at such roles
in childhood. But children
begin to learn the rudiments
of myths, beliefs, totems,
theologies, worldviews,
and aesthetic convention
as soon as they are
born, if not before.
Accordingly, such systems
of symbols are imbedded
in the experience of
childhood, with all
of its "magical
thinking," fear,
loneliness, and worth
(225).

Today’s dream of home, as a single-family detached
house regardless of whether they reside in a high-rise urban apartment
or in temporary housing shelters. This is a clear sign that these children
are receiving certain land development values which they will strive
to realize during their lifetimes. House mortgages are the main debts
that people in the United States work to pay off.

Home ownership is
an economic slavery for those who are upwardly mobile, while those who
are renters are slaves to landlords--that is, if they can afford housing
at all. In The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a
Cultural Symbol, Jan Cohn observes that, "Both as an objectification
of tradition and as the realization of property, the house has been
a bulwark against threats to political stability and, therefore, a profoundly
conservative institution in America" (214).

It is not just in America where the cultural symbol of the nuclear family
house predominates, but increasingly throughout the world. The global
corporations controlling the mass media have indoctrinated the entire
world with this image of the consumer dream house and, in turn, this
image dictates our identity, our social status, and how we must conform
if we are to achieve the American Dream. Perhaps the goal of the multinational
corporations is to saturate the world with the image of the "global
shopping mall" as the only pattern of development. This consumerist
image of development is, of course, a danger to the delicate biosphere
which is planet Earth; a new image of development is imperative for
our very future.

A surprising correlation to this image of home involves romantic relationships
which are also molded to fit into this archetype. In 1926 Edward Carpenter,
in Love's Coming of Age, wrotes,

The man needs an outlet for his passion; the girl is looking for
a "home" and a proprietor. A glamour of illusion descends
upon the two, and drives them into each other's arms. But at a later
hour, and with calmer thought, they begin to realize that it is a life-sentence
which he [the priest] so suavely passed upon them--not reducible (as
in the case of ordinary convicts) even to a term of 20 years (75).

The fairy tale marriage becomes a nightmare of codependency when the
couple becomes totally dependent on one another for their sense of security.
They cannot act independently for fear of causing instability within
the relationship. The male is dependent for emotional and physical support
on the woman playing the traditional female role. The female (or one
who is playing the traditional female role) is dependent on the male
to make all the public decisions and to provide shelter. Anne Schaef
writes,

An addictive relationship is, by definition, a permanent parent-child/child-parent
relationship. It cannot survive if either person becomes a whole person
or a full adult and takes responsibility for her or himself. It is jeopardized
if either person begins to grow or change (28).

In order to free ourselves from these destructive codependent
relationships, ecologists throughout the world are imploring us to radically
change our lifestyles. This change would mean new architectural designs
based on solar energy, recycling, miniaturization, communalism, mass
transportation, and harmony with nature, as well as a new educational,
ecofeminist philosophy based on equal access to knowledge. Worldwide
rainforest loss and ozone depletion are directly linked to land development,
which I argue here is directly linked to child development.

The adult world imposes the single-family detached house worldview on
the child. This has helped guarantee the continued growth of the carcinogenic
megalopolis around the globe. This unhealthy growth can be seen as children
begin drawing their dream house. In Children Drawing, Jacqueline Goodnow
remarks, "The child is developing not just a type of line but also
a concept, discovering similarities, and realizing that many separate
items may be represented by a single symbol" (141). The hypothesis
of Wayner Dennis' book, Group Values through Children's Drawings, is
similar to Goodnow, in that he also theorizes that children's drawings
not only mirror the environment but reflect values or preferences (4).
He writes, "the drawings of children show not only the values of
children but also the values of their society" (7). Herbert Read
likewise notes that the development of art is parallel to developments
of thought, and both are directly linked with social and economic forces.
When there are changes in the “laws” of art, the laws of
the state are likely to change with them (Russell 1981, 26). The law
or archetype of art which must change is the way we perceive home and
the role art plays in making our planetary abode a good, healthy, and
beautiful place.

The Changing Laws of Art

Suzie Gablik explains Kaprow's theory of the two contrasting art traditions
within modernism: it is "artlike" art in which art is seen
as separated from life, making it a mere egocentric object in the buyer\seller
marketplace; and it is "lifelike" art if it is connected with
all of life, and plays a vital role in building community. Lifelike
art revolves around the formation of our relationship with the environment
and with each other, fusing together values and knowledge. The lifelike
artist embodies, and thus, becomes, a work of the Earth spirit, where
as the artlike artist is seen in terms of her or his "competitive
individualism and economic striving." Artists who have succeeded
along the old path of artlike works--receiving money, fame, power and
glamour--have failed to meet the real challenges of our times. Gablik
writes, "The need to transform the egocentric vision that is encoded
in our entire worldview is the critical task that lies ahead for our
culture" (141).

In order to do this, Gablik urges, artists must quit playing the marketplace
games of the "art world," which are only destroying us. Only
by embarking on a new path of health, vision, interconnectedness, and
participation will artists find the self-fulfillment and happiness necessary
for creating a better world. Art then becomes a release of the power
of the lifeforce itself as the artist becomes the avatar, prophetess,
or teacher of a divine message. In this way, lifelike art becomes a
work of wisdom because it relates to the whole. Gablik writes,

Once we have changed the mode of our thinking to the methodology
of participation, we are not so detached. For the participating consciousness,
things are no longer removed, separated, "out there." Objectivity
strips away emotion, wants only the facts and is detached from feeling.
Objectivity serves as a distancing device, offering the illusion of
impregnable strength, certainty and control. Knowledge can then be used
as an instrument of power and domination (178).

The world of the participating consciousness does not destroy the autonomous
vision of the artist; rather, it grounds her or his vision in the social
and ecological responsibility necessary for the founding of an ecocity.
The production of art objects will then no longer be the primary function
of artists, but will be replaced by a new primary goal of becoming teachers
of self-knowledge in the New Cosmology. Jose A. Arguelles sums this
up nicely writes in The Transformative Vision, "If art
is no longer specialized, then it becomes a means of relating to the
whole; that is, it becomes an activity that responds to and helps direct
environmental impulses rather than an art (or a technology) that is
imposed on the environment" (285). Money will no longer be the
goal of life or art. Instead the invisible, non-material, and non-measurable
values of the creative and courageous spirit will be highly rewarded
as people begin to realize that our natural resources are both objective
and subjective phenomena, each necessary for the survival of the species.

Further, we now have the means to create a perfect balance between supply
and demand, a new system where nothing is wasted. It is becoming economically
possible to give value to this vital balance between the invisible and
visible world. Jon Huer describes this "perfect state of economy"
as the aim of all societies to become self-sufficient. Already we have
the means to maintain society's survival needs and life's comforts,
if we choose to use them. Huer writes, "demand is determined through
necessity and supply by (1) the extent of demand and (2) whether the
society has enough resources to meet the demand" (Huer 1991, 277).
In the perfect economic state, no one will demand more than what they
need, and nothing will be supplied that is more than is demanded.

Through this balance all things will become free. With all human wants
satisfied, the misery and pain of human poverty will no longer be a
problem. A time will then come when "our individual life begins"
when a true meritocracy based on virtue and talent is established. Non-economic
values will then replace market values and purchasing power as people's
goals begin to reflect non-material ends. Huer foretells that "the
society’s basic obligation thus fulfilled, it enters what we might
call a post-economic era of high civilization and lofty humanity" (283). Our surplus energy can then be used for the creation of ecocities,
the formation of a society of art and new science, and learning how
to love one another. Carpenter writes,

When mankind [sic] has solved the industrial problem so far that
products of our huge mechanical forces have become a common heritage,
and no man or woman is the property-slave of another, then some of the
causes which compel prostitution, property-marriage, and other perversions
of affections, will have disappeared; and in such an economically free
society human unions may at last take place according to their own inner
and true laws (138).

A panelist at a Earth Day conference in Amherst several years ago said
that in the new epoch the value which will replace profit will be nourishment,
the idea of progress will be replaced by sustainability, power will
be replaced by fulfillment, and products will be replaced by relationships.

The Development of Drawing
in Children

Children are autodidactic; that is, they teach themselves to draw. They
begin by scribbling, then begin drawing abstract forms very much like
primitive drawings. These drawings are enchanting and spontaneous. Rhoda
Kellogg observes that children who are not coaxed by school teachers
and parents to draw real-life objects develop a "store of knowledge
which enables them to reach their final stage of self-taught art"
(17). She believes that confidence in one's self?taught artistic ability
is necessary for the growth of the creative spirit (17).

Teachers and parents who rate a drawing on its realistic similarity
to an object may stifle and kill the confidence of the child. Kellogg
believes adults rob children of the joy of their self-taught, non-pictorial
work by encouraging a representative form of expression. Buckminister
Fuller expresses similar sentiments: "Every child is a genius until
it is degeniused by education."

According to Ellen Winner in Invented Worlds: The Psychology of
the Arts, these earlier stages lead to greater desire and skill
in representing the world in a naturalistic style. By the age of nine
or ten, children draw for optical realism. By adolescence most children
in industrial societies have given up drawing altogether. Helga Eng,
in The Psychology of Child and Youth Drawing, is of the opinion
that naturalistic drawing is the natural form reached in of drawing
development, and that modern abstract art (like that of the youngest
child) is a regressive movement away from the evolution of art. She
explains,

...child and youth drawing does not fraternize with art that is
moving away from realism, away from humanism, away from culture, away
from nature, away from life. The free, spontaneous drawing of child
and youth is akin to Greek Art, "the most natural art ever found."
This kinship seems to indicate that the evolution of Greek art is an
instance of the natural growth of art (13).

Other art educators and modern artists argue that naturalism
is not the most natural form of artistic expression. In Education
Through Art, Herbert Read emphasizes,

We must realize that the child's graphic activity is a specialized
medium of communication with its own characteristics and laws. It is
not determined by canons of objective visual realism, but by the pressure
of inner subjective feeling or sensation. From the very beginning the
drawings of children are wholly and spontaneously of this kind. They
only change because a naturalistic attitude is gradually imposed on
children, first by the necessity of coping with an external world??by
the need they experience of objectifying their perceptual world so that
they can measure it, assess it, deal with it, subdue it; and secondly,
by the impulse to imitate the naturalistic modes of representation which
they see practiced by their parents and teachers. In so far as the former
need is met by conceptual modes of thought, the image merely disappears,
or is devitalized, and no need for representing it graphically or plastically
is experienced; and in actual fact only a few children, belonging to
a specific psychological type, acquire any considerable skill in naturalistic
representation (135).

Read states that nothing could be more unnatural for
the majority of children than naturalistic drawing. Raphy M. Pearson
also expresses a similar view in his book The New Art Education.
He asserts that "children are born creators and remain so until
their native art impulses are killed by the imposition or imitation
of adult standards concerned with skill and literal fact" (206).
And, similar to Rhoda Kellogg, Pearson believes we cause spiritual poverty
to children early in their lives by consciously or unconsciously demanding
that they mold themselves to the established pattern of design. Howard
Gardner asks in, Artful Scribbles: The Significance of Children's
Drawings: "Is our picture of the development of drawing following
the initial stages a genuinely general account, or is it rather a caricature
obtained through the technologically tinted lens of our own culture?"
(159) He believes that children follow a natural progression towards
literalism because they need to know whether the rules of that culture
"promote realism or abstraction." He observes as well that
alternative schools which promoted abstract expressionism became just
as dogmatic and rigid in their own ideology as traditional schools that
promote realistic expression.

I believe that the image of the house encapsulates how children around
the world are molded by naturalistic indoctrination, corrupting their
subjective and objective lives at early stages of development. The symbol
of home breeds isolation and a competitive mentality rather than a sense
of community and love. Houses divides people into ethnic and kinship
groups, rather than creating a culture of the united family of wo/man.
The child becomes alienated from the self, as s/he strives to conform
to the social norms of society’s emphasis upon the single-family
dwelling. Sadly, s/he loses the subjective spirit which connects one
with the universal symbolic language of creative mythology.

In Beyond Alienation, Ernest Becker concludes that, "not
nature, not instinct, but society, social fiction, early training of
the child--these were the sources of constricted behavior, of evil in
the social realm" (157). Becker believes that parents start the
social indoctrination; schools and universities carry it on. Even the
spatial environment of the traditional late-elementary classroom setting,
which divides the chairs into rows composing a grid, reinforces totalitarian
values. The purpose of the such partitioning is to monitor and interrupt
communications, as well as to isolate the student's individual performance,
training them to fit into the competitive job market as they consume
the objective knowledge offer by the school system.

Teaching students to choose the right mate is not even part of the school
curriculum. James Hillman points out in Insearch: Psychology and
Religion that "eros is cultivated through intense internalization."
People reach intimacy with another not so much through horizontal connections,
but through "parallel vertical connections of each within himself
[sic]," creating a spiritual communion with the other (82). But
in the totalitarian system, eros is not even discussed, and it is certainly
not acknowledged as the supreme reality underlying all life!

Some psychologists are perplexed about why the majority of adolescent
children stop drawing. According to Eng there is "little agreement
among drawing psychologists either as to the age at which this stagnation
generally sets in, or the cause of it" (1). It is known that in
nonindustrial cultures, where art is not separated from daily life,
this period of decline does not happen. This drawing stagnation is caused
by the false imposition of naturalistic standards early in the educational
process. Drawing is no longer a source of spiritual joy for adolescents;
the drawing style passed down to them by the adult world is not a form
of liberation, but a form of domination. Throughout sacred time, myths
have been "written" in a universal symbolic language. But
modern people, for the most part, have lost this language--not when
they are asleep, but when they are awake. The dream world is rendered
senseless to the men who build the machines and systems which are so
destructive; the rationality of logos dominates their world. Could it
be that the symbolic inner life itself constructs the good world, and
that now it must be emancipated? (Fromm 1951)

Logos and Mythos

Logos refers to speech used as sequential development and causality,
(unacknowledged) reasoning grounded in the subject of the knower, with
the world objectified for knowing. Logos can be described as gathering,
counting, reckoning, explaining, reasoning, and the categorizing of
stable systems. It is a thinking mode the results of which can supposedly
be demonstrated, measured, and verified. It is a process defined by
precision and can be fit into single modalities. Meaning is here disembodied
from the reality of change and flux. Logos reduces the complexity of
mythos into a purely mechanical and computable certainty.

There has been a long-standing intellectual debate on which mode of
thought, logos or mythos, is the mature and “better” way
of thinking. Established thinking says is that logos and its reductive
inquiry is the better way, while mythos is only "an immature degraded
version of logos" (Sternberg 1990, 56). The personal and inner
dimensions of life are seen as less real than the collective and outer
way of relating to the world. By the outer world, I especially mean
the dualistic worldview set up by the patriarchs, the “fathers
of philosophy,” such as Aristotle, who divides mind from body,
inner from outer, the universal from the particular, and the sacred
from the profane. Aristotle is also, unsurprisingly, sexist. This can
be seen in his description of human reproduction: the woman's womb was
seen as the material and primitive, environment (the ovum was unknown)
while the man's sperm provided the essential spiritual and divine spark.
Women were believed to be utterly and solely biological beings, unable
to sublimate their nature and thus incapable of creating culture or
comprehending science.

In the 18th Century Enlightenment worldview, which rediscovered such
early Greek thought, man was able to remove himself from what he was
observing and rationally analyze what was under his observation. Woman
by contrast was stuck in the material body, and unable to become an
objective observer. Women were considered unable to distinguish between
subjective and objective reality, and therefore could not understand
abstract scientific knowledge. Likewise, female experience was believed
thought to be inferior to that of the scientific male. Susanne Langer
states, Everything that falls outside the domain of analytical, propositional,
and formal thought is merely classified as emotive, irrational, and
animalian.

All other things our minds do are dismissed as irrelevant to intellectual
progress; they are residues, emotional disturbances, or throwbacks to
animal estate and indicated "regression to a pre-logical state"(Labouvie-Vief
1990, 65).

According to Gisela Labouvie Vief, educational theorist Jean Piaget
believed that reality was solely defined by the impersonal, external,
collective outside world. In order to connect with it, the mature adult
had to submit to the processes of logos. Piaget thought that mythos
was a childish and immature state of mind, which the normal child outgrew
with the desire to function within the social framework. The child’s
own innate, inner symbolism was degraded and thought to have no real,
that is objective, meaning. The child is thus forced to forget her or
his inner life in order to fit into the status quo. Self?knowledge,
the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, is lost, as is the
child's natural juno or genius.

For there to be an evolution of wisdom, a reintegration of mythos and
logos clearly needs to take place. Labouvie-Vief writes,

What makes the artist, the poet, or the scientist wise is not expert
technical knowledge in their respective domains but rather knowledge
of issues that are part of the human condition, more generally. Wisdom
consists, so to say, in one's ability to see through and beyond individual
uniqueness and specialization into those structures that relate us to
our common humanity (77-78).

What do we mean by wisdom? Wisdom is the mythic, holistic, Gaian perspective
which is discovered through our own intuitive knowledge of our archaic
selves in relation to the environment. In Skolimowski’s words,
"wisdom is the possession of the right knowledge" which is
"based on a proper understanding of the structural hierarchies
within which life cycles and human cycles are nested and nurtured"
(38). Colin Wilson writes,

What I wish to emphasize here is that a highly developed reasoning
faculty has nothing whatever to do with genius. Nothing was ever discovered
by logic. All things are discovered by intuition, as the lives of the
great mathematicians and scientists prove again and again. Logic plods
after intuition, and verifies discoveries in its own pedestrian way.
Logic is a mere servant of the imagination. To exalt it--as modern thinkers
tend to--is to invite spiritual anarchy (Wilson 1957, 102-3).

Mythos and Love

I believe that, first and foremost, intuitive knowledge calls prophetesses
and prophets to the task of creating a compassionate world. Mythos,
the force which brings things together in a holistic picture--is an
important ingredient motivating force for love. This intuitive "knowledge
of the heart," when focused on the image of a creative humanity,
is essential for planetary salvation. Mythos is the guiding microbial
force that creates harmony between the sexes, and gives logos, science,
and technology an ethical basis upon which to explore nature and the
mysteries of the universe. Love then takes us to the origins of life
and creates new worlds where our dreams become the surrounding culture.
In Becoming Human Through Art, Edmund Burke Feldman writes,

Love has to be a dimension of everything that education means and
does because of the crucial role it plays in bringing about wholeness
of human character. Whether love is an instinct or a type of spiritual
reaching out, it is nevertheless the force that generates all human
effort, especially educational effort, striving always to bring about
oneness among the things it touches (128).

Without love as the nucleus of education, logos will continue to dominate
our culture with the one-sided perspective of scientific “realism.”
Without mythos as the basis of education, educators will remain impotent
in their ability to create the radical social change necessary for our
species’ survival. Edward Carpenter writes,

The conclusion is that the inner laws in these matters--the inner
laws of the sex-passion, of love, and of all human relationship--must
gradually appear and take the lead, since they alone are the powers
which can create and uphold a rational society; and that the outer laws--since
they are dead and lifeless things--must inevitably disappear (143).

There is no reason to believe that children need to conform to naturalism
in order to develop higher stages of reasoning. There is certainly reason
to believe naturalism is necessary in conforming to the status quo.
But this conformity is not an education that produces self-reliant thinkers
and doers, rather it creates only neurotic middle-class workers striving
to make home payments. Finally, Read notes that when young children
are exposed to abstract design and paintings, they will develop an abstract
style. He writes, "it has not been proved that the normal child
has an irresistible desire to make naturalistic representations of objects" (125).

The Origins of Art

In Arnold Hauser's book The Social History of Art, he explains
his theory of why the transcendental or naturalistic state was to be
favored over abstract expression. He believes the domination of realism
originated during the Paleolithic age when people were hunters and gathers,
eating hand to mouth. Because hunting was so important to the survival
of the group, it required an acute awareness of the natural world: all
five senses of the hunter had to be directed outward into the objective
realm.

George Bataille writes, in Prehistoric Painting, Lascaux
or the Birth of Art, that the two capital events in history have
been the making of tools, from which work was born, and the invention
of art, in which play began to delight our minds with wonder. Wonder
is the source of philosophy, which attempts to comprehend the intrinsically
esoteric secret mysteries of life. In the world of work the Homo faber
man was not yet human. He became a Homo sapiens when he began to practice
art, not only for a utilitarian activity, but as a protest to the existing
world. Here began the rivalry between the world of work and the realm
of sexuality and death--the world of art and the goddess tradition.
Hauser asserts that the Paleolithic cave paintings represented the monistic
concrete worldview of empirical reality of the world of work, and not
yet the abstract animistic designs which appeared during the Neolithic
Age.

The animist worldview saw the artist no longer as an imitator of nature,
but its antagonist, opposing the appearance of things with her/his own
homogeneous pattern. With this shift of perspective in turn came the
change in our economic relationship with the environment, as a result
of the agricultural revolution. We were no longer totally at the mercy
of nature, since we had learned to produce our own food. Art, then,
no longer had to be a naturalistic representation of reality. It became
a sign of an idea or vision. This was to change art into a pictographic
sign language.

Primitive and Modern Artists

According to Otto Rank, primitive artists did not have the sense of
individual fame and personal immortality that modern artists strive
to achieve; rather, their art sought to create a collective immortality.
The art work was a picture of the collective soul. Enriching the collective
soul was the aim of art, in "the continuation of the individual
existence in the species" (Rank 1968, 14). The soul needed to be
represented by an abstract idea. Art, therefore, had become spiritual,
not concrete and practical. Art historian Lucy Lippard writes in Overlay, "Art in fact was the concretizing vehicle that permitted the abstract
ideal of religion to be communicated and thereby survive" (10).
Neolithic artists were concerned with the presentation of ideas, and
less concerned with the imitation of nature.

Thus, primitive art and modern art are ideologically opposed: primitive,
or primal, art is integrated with daily life, while modern art is set
totally outside daily life. In the primitive world, both art and religion
were once inseparable aspects of collective life. Lippard writes, "Conflicts
between nature and culture, between historical awareness and supposed
universality of art, clearly did not exist in prehistory" (5).
Nor did they necessarily continue after that. In various periods such
non-figurative art has prevailed: in the Neolithic Age, as well as in
the Celtic and Arabic civilizations. Read says that "such periods
prove that a non-representational tradition can be ‘natural’
or ‘normal’ at all stages of individual development"
(125).

In Modern Art and the Modern Mind, J.P. Hodin states that the
problem between abstract art and figurative art lies in the philosophic
difference between Plato and Aristotle: Plato believed reality could
be found in the world of ideas, but Aristotle believed reality was only
to be experienced through the senses. Abstract art thus represents the
ideas of Plato, and figurative drawing represents the thinking of Aristotle.

In Aristotle's philosophy of art the elements of beauty took different
forms: taxis, symmetria, and horismonon, which are prevalent in mathematics.
Taxis means order; symmetria means measured together; and horismenon
means restriction. These rationalistic modes of order and beauty have
prevailed in Western civilization throughout history. Skolimowski writes,furthermore "the architecture inspired by the mechanistic logos has demonstrably
failed us" (90).

Modern painters may have achieved a level of abstraction somewhat akin
to the Neolithic painters. Gottfried Richter, in Art and Human Consciousness,
has written that "modern art proves that the world of the senses
is only foreground and that the spiritual world is the real, essential
one" (250). Modern artists saw nature as a manifestation of the
self; Jackson Pollock even declared "I am Nature" (McShine
1976, 125). Arshile Gorky, who also painted to express the nature within
himself, agrees:

Beloved, abstraction is therefore the probing vehicle, the progressive
thrust toward higher civilization, toward higher evaluation of the finite
by tearing the finite apart, exploding it so as to thereby enter limitless
areas. Mere realistic art is therefore finite and limits man only to
the perception of his physical eyes, namely that which is tangible.
Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to
extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipator of the
mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas (McShine 1976, 127).

Modern artists felt estranged from society since they had no integral
social role in daily affairs. In Abstract Expressionist Painting
In America, William Sietz writes of the modern artist that, "society
connotes to him not a social organism of which he is a part, but a huge
middle-class world of property, manufacturing, buying and selling--a
society to which he is alien" (139). The painter Robert Motherwell
felt the artist was a spiritual creature trapped in a property-loving
world. Shortly before his death, Vincent van Gogh said that the great
steps in the future of art would be taken collectively, for no one would
be able to bear the burden alone (Russell 1981, 104). What is this collective
burden? Isn't it to create a new world? Indeed, modern and postmodern
artists seem to yearn for a position in society which directs culture,
rather than being received into the market place.

It could be said that the modern painter rebelled from the scientific
experiences of the senses and returned to the archaic, out of the inner
necessity of creating a new civilization. It was hoped that this civilization
would foster a new relationship between the collective and the individual;
in other words, between the social myth and the artist. The modern artist
was in conflict with the collective myth, but unlike the primitive artist
who perpetuated the collective myth, she or he aspired to achieve individual
immortality through creating a new collective myth, a new dreambody.

Unfortunately, the modern period was not able to create a total revolution
toward a new way of collective living, even though it did provide us
with a new way of visualizing the world. This new way of seeing did
not fully revolutionize art education; modernism failed to provide us
with a political philosophy of art which could link our imaginations
together.

Plato is one of the few philosophers who realized that art and society
are inseparable concepts. Government is not a science, but an art having
the power to fuse the divided world.

For there to be an effective revolutionary movement, a visual plan of
action, evolving from the arts, must be implemented at the pre-school
level and be allowed to continue to develop throughout life. Education
must change its perspective on home by presenting images of futuristic
high?tech ecological cities, or arcologies, in various bioregions on
our home planet of Spaceship Earth. In this plan, both the practical
skills of realism and the spiritual qualities of abstract art will be
needed to deconstruct the present system and visualize the reconstruction
of the world. We can no longer afford for these two viewpoints to be
antagonistic towards one other.

The real images of our archetypal home are uniquely different for each
individual, for it is inside the mind where the self resides. For those
people who are not innately inclined to it, liberation from naturalistic
way of self-expression is required so that they can reconnect with the
mythic universal language, while providing a new visual model of collective
behavior from a concrete architectural plan. This will offer us the
foundation for a new artistic and educational philosophy.

Becker writes, "We need a unified world picture, founded on a living
myth and vital belief; and we need in addition knowledge that is personally
liberating, that makes our action less automatic and more free within
the society that follows that belief" (128). He believes human
freedom comes about in a community when it nourishes the highest development
of both the individual and the community. In this community, unlimited
knowledge is the goal and the mysteries of life guide communal action.
The community's concern should be the best way to free the energies
of all people, and communal meaning will incorporate the "celebration
of the broadest and deepest meanings of the universe" (219). From
this new place in the universe, the value of the human soul will be
rediscovered, and the divine self will be found, as the illusions of
commercial society fades into history.

Modern science has not been able to explain the mystery of life, nor
answer the essential questions about the nature of the cosmos and the
origins and meaning of human life. Nor has it been able to discover
the "mechanism of the imagination." Yet these mysteries reveal
themselves through the symbolic nature of the intuitive arts. A symbolic
order remains necessary for us if we are to know our individual place
in the organic-cosmic universe. Herbert Read observes, "science
has in no means replaced the symbolic functions of art, which are still
necessary to overcome the resistance of the brutish world" (Read
1967, 22).

Albert Einstein realized that science did not have the knowledge needed
to solve the world’s critical problems. He believed that the problem
of the survival of our species would be found within the dimension,
not of science or mathematics, but in the arts and theology. Jean Houston
writes, "Myths and archetypes communicate from the poetic level
of mind and thought, allowing Nature to speak to the imagining soul
rather than just presenting us with scientific laws and probabilities" (20). She sees a new world myth arising from Gaia. From this new myth,
we can begin to build the architecture of the Imagination, so that the
temples of our legacy are not the nuclear power plants, toxic waste
sites, shopping malls, and suburban sprawl of the Modernist Era. Clearly,
these must be replaced by the visionary architecture of ecocities.

Our brutish culture divides the society into pluralistic subcultures.
Read explains, "The culture of an artist or a philosopher is distinct
from that of a mine worker or field labourer; the culture of a poet
will be somewhat different from that of a politician; but in a healthy
society these are all parts of the same culture" (Read 1967, 23).
By means of the suppressive visual formula of home, children first become
trained to conform to the brutish world ruled by modern science, and
it will be through a liberated artistic expression of a universal order,
beginning with the training of children, where we will collectively
find salvation. Instead of each individual pursuing her or his own dream
house and personal pleasures, in the new cultural mythos, people will
begin to share meaning, communal goods, natural resources, and social
justice, so that everyone will have the means to pursue human happiness
for the betterment of humanity.

In The Redemption of the Robot, Herbert Read writes that, the "imagination seeks and finds archetypal forms. Civilization is
the search for these forms; civilizations decline when they relinquish
the creation of form" (252). The first concern of politicians and
dictators has always been to control and manipulate images and archetypes
so that they serve the interest of the ruling class. Parents and teachers
must stop being the unwitting, yet sinister, administrators of these
social dogma and archetypes, which are destroying the ecology, and perpetuating
the false hegomony of the socioeconomic structure of the ruling class,
especially as encapsulated in the private house. It is imperative that
the censorship of the poetic vision be stopped. As the houses of history
collapse, the "blueprint of the archaic" may once again come
forth to give us an eternal beginning, which "calls for a totally
different design and points of stress."

Educators must begin to enact this great paradigm shift of understanding
and communal living by revolutionizing the way we perceive and draw
the home. With the collapse of the inner house of the soul, the outer
walls of the built environment will soon lose their support and the
square house will collapse (Arguelles 1975). To be locked into the square
house is a prison cell for the mind.

One of the basic messages of Buckminster Fuller's teachings is that
the square is an unsound form on which to structure civilization. The
triangle, which is also integral to the circle, is the basis of universal
order. Further, North Americans must no longer delude themselves that
land ownership is the way to insure a just democracy, for it is clearly
not. The pluralistic ideology that has emerged from the democratic society
is unable to create the new social myth which we need in order to evolve
and save the species. Our future rests in the new social vision. The
social mission of education is to offer an alternative vision to students.

The Collective Wisdom

Advocates for the homeless’ building their own houses--as opposed
to their living in makeshift shanty towns on the edge of megacities,
or government planners building anonymous mass housing for them—should
examine the new communal archetype in architecture. Advocates for a
people's architecture must begin to realize that we can no longer live
with Plato's belief that every man should build a house before he dies,
that somehow it is one's divine right to build one's own home. No longer
can we act as if it is environmentally and socially desirable to individually
house one's own biological family. As I have shown in previous chapters,
the notion of private ownership of land is part of our dysfunctional
intrafamilial relationship, and are environmentally unsustainable.

The myth of building one's own home has lead to a mediocre and unhealthy
environment which lacks any artistic merit. Skolimowski writes,

In our lowbrow culture, which is so often proletarian in the worst
sense, the architect must assert his [sic] role as a patrician, must
lead instead of bowing to acquisitive and materialist preferences. Only
when people transcend their obsession with material acquisitiveness--which
is one of the chief causes of environmental destruction and of our inner
emptiness--will it be time for the architect to relinquish his [sic]
role as the designer of a complete environment (101).

Advocates for a people's architecture say shelter-making is a basic
human drive. Let's hope it is so, since shelter-making is what we desperately
need in order to build successful and magnanimous ecocities. This new
orientation will require a massive effort on the part of everyone. For
ecocities to become reality, all members of the world community must
contribute to their spiritual and material construction in a variety
of ways, re-linking people with nature.

The problem is affecting another forefront of human habitat, the biosphere.
The biospheric technology (e.g., the Biosphere II experiment) merges
together ecology and technology, the organic and the mechanical. The
enclosed pod of Biosphere II is clearly an opportunity to finally fuse
together the two basic architectural archetypes in order to radically
change power and economic relationships. However, there is now discussion
about using this technology to create individual housing units. In an
article entitled "Biosphere 2 at One" Kevin Kelly writes,

A personal biosphere is only a couple of jumps away from a long
American tradition of self-sufficient homesteads...A personal household
biosphere is the pinnacle of self-sufficiency. You drink your own recycled
pee, breathe your own recycled farts, eat your own recycled shit. Not
only do you make your own granola, you make your own atmosphere! (104)

Biospheric technology used in this fashion would only further nuclear
family isolation, making the home into a high-tech cocoon. Of course,
the poor who could not afford the new kind of shelter will be left without
the protection of the clean environment of life underneath the dome.
In this model, biospheres will be built to make a profit, and so the
capitalist system would use another technology to serve the greed and
self-interest of the few in clean, environmentally safe ways.

Using biospheres for individual housing units is absolutely unethical,
as well as impractical. Using biospheres as nuclear family units will
only perpetuate the domination model of the dysfunctional intrafamilial
relationship. The Greeks believed the idion or individual domain was
the province of idiocy. The evolutionary path we must follow is one
which uses the technology to build shelter which is based on justice
and equality for all. We have the architectural and technologic know-how
to build ecocities, and it is our moral duty to do so.

Future civilization lies in visualizing, and eventually creating, new
urban environments made up of biospheric arcologies. It is our adult
responsibility to prepare children for this new way of living. It is
time to abandon our old concept of housing, which has divided the world
into master space and slave space, and move towards a planet of arcologies
interconnected through telecommunications. Arcologies will provide us
with the space to build community again, so that women and men will
have places in which to "circulate, meet, and enter into union
with one another" (Canto 1986, 344). Gyorgy Kepes writes in Structure
in Art and in Science, "To reach what we all hope for, to
become worthy of an environment worth living in, we must do what we
can to bring our outer and our inner worlds together--renew the ancient
marriage of art and science, art and nature" (vii). In Greek, ecology
literally means home, and by building arcologies, planet earth will
become the temple of harmony and balance between psyche and techne.

Summary

In this chapter we have seen how the Jeffersonian American Dream is
based on a concept of land ownership brought over by European colonists.
The lust for private ownership of land destroyed the Native American
way of life that for eons had lived in balance with the natural forces.
Throughout the world, children are learning to conform to the American
dream house as they adopt the traditional patterns of drawing behavior
based on Greek perspective. This destroys their subjective, inner voices,
as well as the external world of the global ecology that they will embrace.
Under this worldview, children lose the joy of drawing and love for
art as they begin to conform to the rigid rules of naturalism. Modern
artists sought to liberate humanity from this three-dimensional, scientific
perspective by developing an inner voice through intuitive and abstract
art. Perhaps luckily, Modernism did not become a powerful revolutionary
force capable of changing the way children perceive home. What is urgently
needed now is a new image of home which respects the interconnectness
of all things.